Techniques to Grab Your Audience’s Attention

We’ve all been there. Halfway through listening to a text-heavy, detailed presentation, our minds start to wander. We can’t focus on the important content and we just stop listening. Highlighting important content in your presentation is essential to grabbing your audience’s attention and most importantly, holding it. It allows the audience follow and remember the essential points and your message.

Anyone who has ever designed a presentation is familiar with this challenge: Part of your audience skims through the slides while others get stuck on a particular piece of information. One way to prevent this is to strategically direct the audience’s attention to your most salient points. Here are a few techniques to help you do this:

• Gray out or blur elements: Less important information may distract your audience from your key points. A good trick is to gray out or blur anything that may distract. Also, elements can be faded out or hidden to draw attention to something else. For example, fade out or hide key points after you have discussed them.

• Use the blur effect as a stylistic device: When used correctly, blurriness creates anticipation. Words or text fragments, which first appear blurred, pique the audience’s curiosity — of course they’ll want to see more! Showing content only when you are ready to discuss it will keep your audience on the edge of their seats and make your content more memorable. The presentation will leave a lasting impression.

• Build an arc of suspense by gradually fading information in: It’s far more effective to display information bit by bit than to show the entire slide all at once. This automatically directs the audience’s attention to the relevant, newly revealed key points. The audience’s focus will remain on what is currently being discussed.

• Give important elements more visual impact: Important elements should stand out from the rest of the presentation. Color accents, underlining, or highlighting can emphasize important text passages. These effects automatically draw the eye and make the text stand out.

• Use animations and moving elements: Animations are also a great way to guide the audience’s focus. Moving elements attract attention and pique interest. Arrows and frames, for example, which appear during the presentation, can be used to draw attention to certain text passages. This technique is works really well with tables when you want one piece of information to stand out.

Try using a combination of these different techniques. For example, an out-of-focus image will generate curiosity. After the image comes into focus, a circle can be used to highlight key information on the image. By skillfully applying the above techniques, you can intuitively control where the audience’s gaze and attention is directed. The audience remains focused on the important points on each slide and on your message.